Feature - Youth centres: The shape of clubs to come

There aren't many five-star hotels that have the Dyson airblade hand dryer fitted as standard. Or that have the touch-sensitive tiles for turning on and off the showers. That's why it's surprising to find them in a youth club.

This isn't any old youth club, though. This is the £8m Salmon Youth Centre in Bermondsey, south London - the new flagship centre of Clubs for Young People and one of the clubs that was trumpeted in this year's 10-year youth strategy as providing a blueprint for how youth facilities could look in the future.

While spending money on luxury fixtures and fittings might seem a wilful waste of precious youth work resources, the youth centre is unrepentant about its approach.

"For every item in the club, we've carried out a detailed analysis of the long-term running costs," says David Anderson, development manager at Salmon Youth Centre. "The Dyson hand dryers use less energy than traditional ones and require minimal maintenance."

It's this approach for not settling for second best that characterises the ethos behind the Salmon Youth Centre. And it's an approach that it hopes will attract young people in the coming years.

The club is located on Old Jamaica Road in Bermondsey, a deprived part of south London where council tenement blocks dominate the skyline and where spaces for young people to hang out are restricted to a few small youth projects and unappealing parks.

There's been a youth centre on the site since 1949 when the Cambridge University Mission Settlement moved its clubs for young people there after its previous premises were damaged during the war. The club was later rebuilt in the early 70s but by the mid-90s it was beginning to show its age, as Sam Adofo, youth work manager at the Salmon Youth Centre, recalls: "It was a real mishmash," he says. "There seemed to be stairs everywhere and not really one good space to run sessions. Most of the rooms had just been added with not much thought."

Razed to the ground

In 1996, the trustees commissioned an options study to establish what could be done to improve the site. The findings were conclusive: it would be better to knock down the existing structure and start again than try to improve what was already there. Work on the new proposals began in earnest in 1999, by which time Mark Blundell had been appointed as executive director of the club.

"When I started in 1999 there was a plan to have a new building," says Blundell. "Since then we've had to go out and sell our vision that we want to build the best centre for young people in the area."

Selling that vision has not been easy. The plan to create a "holistic" youth centre that incorporated a range of sports, arts, IT and training facilities meant that many charitable funding organisations were reluctant to promise significant amounts of cash as the centre crossed over many types of youth work and funding streams. "They struggled to fit us into a box," says Blundell. "They weren't sure whether we were about sports, arts or education."

The big fillip came in March 2004 when Sport England came on board, promising to invest a minimum of £2.75m in return for incorporating a state-of-the-art sports hall into the proposals. Equally important was the funder's willingness to pay 20 per cent upfront to help the Salmon secure the necessary planning permissions.

Subsequent funders have bought into the vision since, most notably Southwark Council, which has invested about £1.7m to date, and the London Development Agency, which has contributed about £600,000. But without this early promise of investment from Sport England, the whole project could have run aground before the planners were presented with the architects' drawings.

While it is difficult to tell as the seven-storey building nears completion, the actual construction has been beset by delays. The sports hall opened a year late in December 2006 and phase one of the process should have been completed by summer 2006 (see boxout) but now won't open until early next year. The single biggest problem occurred in the summer of 2006 when the main building contractor went bust.

A new builder was quickly found, but it asked for more money, leaving the Salmon owing £800,000 with no additional investment on the horizon. Insolvency looked increasingly like a possibility. "It was a bit touch and go for a while," admits Blundell. "Fortunately, the local authority stepped in to help out and we were able to keep the project going."

Against the odds

Despite the challenges, Blundell refuses to be downbeat about the experience. "With a building project, there is always something else," says Blundell. "You've never got enough money - everyone in the construction trade will tell you that. We just adopted a youth work approach throughout: we learned from our mistakes and asked questions when we didn't understand something. Yes, we made some absolute howlers along the way, but we didn't get too despondent as that's not the youth work way."

Now phase one is almost complete, the centre plans to open from 9am to 10.30pm on weekdays. During the daytime, the sports hall will be used mainly by local schools while the rest of the facilities will be open to young people on training programmes such as enterprise schemes run by The Prince's Trust. Between 4pm and 6pm there will be specialist sports evenings, such as badminton and basketball as well as homework clubs and other formal activities. From 6pm onwards, the youth clubs will offer a variety of sports and arts workshops.

While the centre will work with young people aged eight to 15, it hopes to attract the harder-to-reach older age group. "One of my hobbyhorses is that youth work gets younger and younger," says Blundell. "When I came into youth work, the bottom age was 14 and I can remember sitting in the clubs and saying to 13-year-olds you can't come in here. I don't think that was right but I think we've lost that work with the older young people."

So has the centre been worth all the sleepless nights and the £8m investment so far? "Absolutely," says Blundell. "Before we started the project we had about 6,000 to 7,000 visits a year. In three to five years' time, we hope there will be nearer 60,000 to 70,000, which has to be worthwhile."

One young club member Brooke Hills, aged 10, who already attends the sports centre five times a week, agrees: "There are other clubs in the area but there is not much there," she says. "Here there is big a sports hall where I come along and play different sports on different nights of the week."

Her cousin, 11-year-old Dean Wrighton, is equally enthusiastic. "The old club was too small," he says. "The new one will have lots of things do and somewhere good to hang out."

INSIDE THE SALMON

The youth centre is being built in two phases, with the first phase due to be officially opened in early 2008 and the second expected to be completed in two years' time. Under phase one, a state-of-the-art sports centre large enough to accommodate four badminton courts has been built as well as the main youth centre building. Under phase two, an IT and arts facility will begin construction next year.

In the basement of the main building are changing facilities for about 70 people, all of which are disability friendly and can be reached by the lift. On the ground floor, there is a lobby leading into a reception and a multifunctional seating area which can also be used as a performance space.

The first floor is spilt into a series of zone, with a sound control room for music production training, a seniors' room, a dance rehearsal space and a quiet room for contemplation. There's also access to an external climbing wall that spans the outside of the building.

The second-floor is mainly an enterprise zone from where young people will be able to set up and run their own business. The space also has training rooms which will be used for homework clubs and other activities.

A residential tower has been built on top, comprising communal living spaces and self-contained flats for key workers and youth work trainees and a three-bedroom apartment for a senior member of staff who will live on-site.

David Anderson, development manager at Salmon Youth Centre, says. "We've tried to incorporate lots of flexible spaces and make it really low maintenance to run in the long-term."